The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Trim

Gentle readers, I have once again decided that my aerial partners and I shall dance as characters whose costumes, while representing an apex of sartorial splendor, are vastly unsuited to anything but virtual reality.  My job is to render these clothes to a reality suitable for aerialists.

In this post I deal with the lacey trim on Lulu's sleeves and train:

Ideally, I would do this with lace or embroidered iron-on applique.  However, this lace pattern is not, to my knowledge, made commercially, and I do not make my own lace.  I prioritized the pattern over the material, and chose to do the trim with fabric paint.  I used Tulip dimensional slick paint: it does dry flexible, as advertised, and it won't be entirely flat, but I can easily control the thickness.  

Step 1: make the pattern with pencil and paper.  Take the time to make sure you are happy with what you have, because after this it will be all tracing what you've made.  Lulu's trim is all two-part mirror image, so only draw half and then flip and trace the reverse for the second half.

Step 2: ink your pattern.  Sharpie markers are best, as you want the pattern to bleed through the paper for purposes of flipping and tracing the mirror image, as mentioned above. 

 Step 3: use temporary fabric marker to trace the pattern onto your fabric.  This is dark fabric, so I had to improvise a crude lightbox to be able to see the pattern through the fabric.

 

Step 4: fabric paint!  Get a bottle with a narrow tip to avoid the aggravation of brushes.  Make sure you have waxed paper or waxed cardboard under your fabric.  Work from top to bottom and from your non-dominant hand side to your dominant hand side to lower your chance of smudging your work.  Below is one sleeve:

I got both sleeves done today.  It took about 1.5 hours per sleeve, not counting making the patterns, which I did yesterday.  The (divided by necessity) skirt portions still needed some finishing before I applied paint; I'll do those later this week.  

 While scowling at my various image files of Lulu and sketching my patterns, I wondered about the possibility of writing a program that could take an image file of something like Lulu's trim, folded and curved as it appears on clothing, and apply transformations to turn the relevant portions into a linear strip with the correct proportions, magically increase resolution from frequently blurry screenshots, and print out a pattern.  My guess is that the first part is possible.  The second part, not so much: obtaining good resolution stills of the parts of the costume I need to study has always been a problem for my cosplay work.